quotable - things are not much different

I am reading Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer.  At a mere one-fifth of the way through, I’ve been struck by two things.  First, Martin Luther’s vigorous anti-Semitism late in life.  In his final years, Luther penned one treatise in particular that the Nazi Party later used to influence the German people and the German Lutheran church to adopt its anti-Jewish agenda.  "What he wrote during this time," commentates Metaxas, "would rightly haunt his legacy for centuries and would in four centuries become the justification for such evils as Luther...could not have dreamed" (p. 93).  Second, Bonhoeffer’s observations about the state of the church in America.  At age 24, already holding a doctorate in theology but one year too young to be ordained as a pastor in Germany, Bonhoeffer studies in the United States for a year.  The date is 1930-31.  He journals the following (quoted from pages 106-107):

“Things are not much different in the church [than they were in Union Theological Seminary, where Bonhoeffer was enrolled].  The sermon has been reduced to parenthetical church remarks about newspaper events…The enlightened American, rather than viewing all this with skepticism, instead welcomes it as an example of progress…

In New York they preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life. 

This is quite characteristic of most of the churches I saw.  So what stands in place of the Christian message?  An ethical and social idealism borne by a faith in progress that – who knows how – claims the right to call itself “Christian.”  And in the place of the church as the congregation of believers in Christ there stands the church as a social corporation…All these things, of course, take place with varying degrees of tactfulness, taste, and seriousness; some churches are basically “charitable” churches; others have primarily a social identity.  One cannot avoid the impression, however, that in both cases they have forgotten what the real point is.”